Cisco's CIO Calls For Speed And Agility At Interop

Cisco CIO describes the company's experience delivering employee IT services and how its latest announcement, OpFlex, fits into her vision.

Wednesday's Interop Las Vegas conference (run by UBM Tech, InformationWeek's parent company) featured Rebecca Jacoby, SVP and CIO of Cisco. Network Computing managing editor Marcia Savage and I followed the action in the comments below. Add your own thoughts or ask a question, and we'll be sure to follow up.

Jacoby explained how the role of the CIO has become more visible and an opportunity for innovation as technology has become more important to businesses, having progressed from simple connectivity to the networked economy, a world of digital interactions, and now the Internet of everything.

"IT is changing faster than we can imagine," said Jacoby. She urged IT leaders to adopt a new IT model that is agile and helps IT act as a catalyst for change. Policy-driven architectures and leveraging the knowledge of the community toward delivering those architectures are important, she said.

As an example, Cisco also announced the OpFlex open protocol Wednesday at Interop. Cisco said OpFlex, used in conjunction with its Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC) controller, will allow customers to streamline management of multi-vendor networks. In announcing the protocol, Cisco said its approach with ACI differs from the OpenFlow-based approach, which it described as putting all intelligence in a controller that becomes a bottleneck.

Susan Fogarty has almost two decades of experience writing and developing content for IT professionals, especially those deeply involved in enterprise network infrastructure. She previously worked at TechTarget, where she spent 11 years, six as the Editorial Director of its ... View Full Bio

I think we've been seeing this for at least the past few years. IT as a silo is a thing of the past and if we try to fit our departments into that model it's a recipe for disaster. The IT environment is becoming more flexible because the way it is being used has changed drastically. The days of leaving work at work are over so to keep up with that trend IT in general has to become more agile.

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